I suppose we all see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear, but David Brooks’ peculiar oped “Party of Strivers” in the New York Times Friday, concerning the putative — I guess you could call it libertarian — selfishness of Republicans at the Tampa convention, is worthy of examination, not so much because of Brooks, but because of what it reveals of the zeitgeist.

Brooks should appreciate that since he made his reputation describing the zeitgeist some years ago in Bobos in Paradise. Now he seems to be a victim of it. Here’s Brooks:

On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic Party, which says: We don’t have an agenda, but we really don’t like theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.

But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Hello, where were you, David? On Thursday evening, one after the other private citizen came forth to testify to Mitt Romney’s extraordinary personal charity and deep community spirit. I have never seen anything like it at a convention, Republican or Democrat. I don’t know if you would call it Burkean, but you would certainly call it eminently decent and highly laudable. The culmination was Ted and Pat Oparowsky of New Hampshire who recounted how much time and attention the young Mitt Romney gave their son, a child he did not know, when the boy was dying of cancer.

Party of strivers? Well, maybe David was on the phone to his editors while these folks were speaking or just got bored because they were mostly anonymous and not glamorous Upper West Side Paradise Bobos of any sort.

Okay, that’s mean. After all, Brooks has facts to back up his position:

Today’s Republicans strongly believe that individuals determine their own fates. In a Pew Research Center poll, for example, 57 percent of Republicans believe people are poor because they don’t work hard. Only 28 percent believe people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. These Republicans believe that if only government gets out of the way, then people’s innate qualities will enable them to flourish.

But there’s a problem. I see what the G.O.P. is offering the engineering major from Purdue or the business major from Arizona State. The party is offering skilled people the freedom to run their race. I don’t see what the party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose wages have stagnated for a decade, or the factory worker whose skills are now obsolete.

Let’s start with the poll. The problem is that most intelligent people wouldn’t know how to answer it because it should be obvious that both are true — you’re responsible for your own fate and circumstances can affect you. Not rocket science, as they say. So like many polls, it doesn’t tell you much, particularly whether Republicans are heartless strivers ripped from the pages of Ayn Rand. In fact, as I’m sure Brooks well knows, conservatives have long been known to be much more generous in their charitable giving than liberals. Yes, as has been pointed out, that equals out some when you exempt religious charities, but only some. (Red state Utah leads the nation in charitable giving with blue state New Hampshire at the bottom. Joe Biden, as usual, is another matter.)

Greedy strivers? Not so simple is it? And then we come to the problem of the poor waitress with two kids Brooks refers to. What do the Republicans have to offer her since she’s not about to move to Sunnyvale, California, and rock that start-up?

Well, it couldn’t be more obvious given the current situation — EMPLOYMENT!

(As for the warehouse worker, his best hope for a raise, as Brooks must realize, is an economic revival. Ditto the worker with obsolete skills. Pace Solyndra, we’ve already seen what happens when the government gets involved. Greedy strivers indeed are the only ones who get rich — but they happen to be Democrats.)

So why is Brooks writing this swill? I met him briefly and, as far as I can tell, he’s a nice guy and certainly a good writer.

The answer is that he’s not so very different than the waitress he describes. He’s got a job and he wants to keep it. As the resident conservative at the NYT he can only go so far in telling the truth. If he went further, he’d risk unemployment (not to mention diminution of status). Consciously and unconsciously, he writes with a gun to his back or, perhaps more accurately, a fog machine blowing across the back of his brain and up through his occipital lobe while some barely heard hypnotic voice recites “remember not to go too far… remember not to go too far… contradict… contradict….”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the same editorial page of the New York Times, Paul Krugman (or facsimile) bloviates on with no equivocation. The message — the one the newspaper eminently seeks to convey — is that liberals speak their (correct) ideas forthrightly while conservatives understand they must temper what they say. After all, conservatives have only a very small part of the truth. David Brooks is the (hopefully) unwitting conveyor of this message. He helps the New York Times do its work and is an integral part of it.

It’s worth observing as carefully as possible how this happens, because Brooks is far from the only one with that fog blowing up his occipital lobe. It’s an epidemic. And it could be fatal to the future of this country as we move into the election.

90 Comments, 51 Threads

1.
John J

Pray tell, in what forsaken corner of the Universe does Brooks count as a “Conservative”?
People. Pay attention! They all LIE! All day long; twice on Sunday. They are never, ever NOT lying! They have spent 60 years trying to say that there is no reality, no truth, no objectivity.
The simplest, one word answer to all their sophistry and just plain bullshit is, “LIAR!”
All else is airy persiflage! (H/t: Gilbert. 140 years later, still my go-to guy!)
For chrissakes, some idiots still waste ink on Andrew Sullivan! He’s a gay tool! What else could you possibly need to know? When he pretended to be a conservative, HE WAS LYING TO YOU!
Reality bites you in the ass, once you begin to deny it. I don’t know who said it, but I claim title to it, unless you can prove otherwise!

To be charitable – when he isn’t a bloviating gasbag – Brooks is more of a European-style big-government conservative. If he were German, he’d be a leading light in the Christian Democrats, and he would have been right at home in John Major’s Conservative Party.

He’s also ruthlessly elitist (another Euro-Con trait), instinctively favoring right-school and right-birth – or at least right-cultured – over strivers with degrees from Enormous State Universities and a taste for barbecue.

He was also more comfortable with George W. Bush’s big-government “Compassionate Conservatism” – which was also more European in its conservatism than American – over more libertarian Republicans.

What offends Brooks about modern American conservatism is its rejection of government and policy in general. He is quite right in pointing out that massive restructuring or abandonment of New Deal and Great Society programs and bureaucracies is rather radical, and if you define “conservative” as “keep everything intact”, along with “trust elites and the institutions that produce them”, then modern Republicans aren’t conservative.

But at the end of the day, it’s all word games. If opposing and tearing down Leviathan in favor of a small, effective government is not conservative in his eyes, so be it.

I tend to agree with you and people act in their own best interest with the best of us capable of altruistic actions as well.Conservatives are honest about it while Progressives conceal it. “Activists” pursue their own best interests by pretending to care about mostly lazy people while persuading those moochers to let the activists control every aspect of their lives with votes for welfare being the mechanism. Liberalism demands control of society while Conservatism abhors it.

Right. Brooks has changed somewhat since he took the job as house conservative at the NYT. He isn’t a real conservative any more, if he ever was. He’s a moderate-liberal which, in the NYT rarefied atmosphere, passes for a conservative. That may be one of many reasons why, when the NYT tries to deconstruct the various conservative tribes, it misses the mark so completely. They don’t know any real conservatives. All they know is caricatures like those made up by a media that can’t find any real people at Tea Party events, only gun-totting racists, or that looks on David Brooks and congratulates the NYT for being so broad-minded as to give him a job.

Well, some dipstick who writes articles for PJM recently had him on a list of the “top 10 Conservative writers”…doesn’t that mean he HAS to be?

If he ever was one, he’s not anymore…and never will be again as along as he wants to stay employed by Pravda. The only surprise to me is that people are still surprised when they notice he’s just a shill for President Creased Pants.

Why is David Brooks considered a Conservative? He seems to be all in for the latest cliché: compromise, meaning we all work together to promote the progressive agenda. He seems to think that individualism is a sickness of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging people who don’t live in or around New York city.

If we compromise with lawless Democrats and other left-wing goons and thugs (such as Mayor Bloomberg and Barack Obama), Republicans will become like them, but right wing goons and thugs.

David is more like a RINO than anything else, even though he is part of the media establishment.

In fact, my blog commentary describes his type to a tee, just place his name wherever RINO is, and the outcome is still the same – ‘Republican National Convention Heralds ‘Arab Spring’ In Its Platform…Oblivious To The Unfolding Arab/Muslim Nightmare’.

Google ‘Adina Kutnicki’ and the blog will pop up.
Links still ! bounce.

David Brooks is not a conservative at heart, only for ‘professional’ purposes it would appear. That is, if you consider the lying and propaganda spewing NYT as anything resembling a ‘professional’ organization…

“I don’t see what the party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose wages have stagnated for a decade, or the factory worker whose skills are now obsolete”

Waitress with two kids? Umm, where’s her husband? Mm-hmm. Things would not be so tough for her if she had one. Perhaps she should get working on that?

Warehouse worker for a decade? You are still working in a warehouse after 10 years?!? Just what do you do with all your free time, rather than getting some other work skills?

Factory worker whose skills are obsolete? See warehouse worker above. Perhaps, if you work in manufacturing, you should subscribe to some industry journals, or just borrow them from the boss, so’s you don’t get caught flat-footed when your industry changes.

Quit doing the absolute minimum, and you’ll quit being the least you can be.

Nice way to tear down men there but the stats don’t back you up. Generally the category that has exploded hasn’t been women who divorce to escape a changed-for-the-worse spouse but rather women who have never married at all. Blacks are furthest along the trend but whites and hispanics seem to be succumbing to that pathology at the same pace.

Graduate from high school, get married before you have kids and stay together remains the best anti-poverty strategy in the US. Not everybody can make it but those who throw up alternate explanations are not doing the poor a service.

Use common sense people, “in many cases” is not a number. Nor is it a percentage.

The reality is that in over 60% of divorces, the wife initiated it because she’s not haaaapy, doesn’t feel fulfilled, or other such narcissistic emotional fluff non-reasons. You can look it up in Braver and McConnell, 1998.

Bottom line, sinz54 also suffers from “odd blindness.”

Is man-hating related to lib-left hatred of productive people – people who build things? People who make an individual effort rather than sit around waiting for a cheque from the State they’ve married themselves to? Think about it.

I think part of being a conservative is having a belief in one’s ability to overcome adverse circumstances, that you have to try no matter what and you have to view being poor or uneducated or disadvantaged in some way as a temporary condition, one that you have to try to change and one that you can change, maybe not completely but you can make it better. So if you ask a conservative if the poor have themselves to blame, the answer is yes because a conservative assumes the questioner is talking about the chronically impoverished, the kind of poverty that gets passed down from generation to generation.

Most conservatives are very well aware that breaking out of a cycle of poverty takes help and that what we believe is that it’s up to the person to find ways to get that help and to take full advantage of it to change circumstances, not even so much for yourself as for your children. The classic way that has occurred in this country is through education, starting with the free K-12 education that’s made available to everyone. [This is also why I think Condi Rice is correct when she says that the current poor quality of public school education is the civil rights challenge of our time because it's not working anymore, it's not allowing families to break out of the cycle of poverty, which isn't just the fault of the schools, it's also a function of the breakdown of the family structure, cultural influences that denigrate studying hard and staying in school, etc.]

That seemed to be the common theme of a lot of the speakers, about how the generation or generations before them worked hard so that their children could do better, could have more opportunity, and that the message is that this used to work but it’s not working anymore. The way it is now you can get a decent education and not be able to find a job. You can be willing to work hard and try and do better but the opportunities aren’t there. Nobody can really get ahead anymore or have great difficulty trying to make life better for their children.

No matter what the macro environment, it is possible for people to better themselves. My in-laws in communist Romania (a pathological, controlling government bar none) were considered crazy for not buying an apartment but instead a ruin of a house that they spent the next couple of decades pouring resources into starting with the roof. Their relatives and friends today are not nearly as well off as they are.

All this does not make communism good. It means that individual effort matters even in the worst of circumstances.

Liberals and progressives are a twofer of both poo poohing individual effort and striving for macro societal changes that make things worse on a liberty front. Even liberalism’s historical love of social liberty has gone by the wayside.

Every story was a participation in the games and traditions of capitalism – that’s what Brooks fails to see. He’s swallowed the socialist swill that capitalism is a jungle. I will give him half a point – some Republicans see it that way, too. The Libertarians wish it were that way – though they are also very clear that it is NOT that way now!

I see what the G.O.P. is offering the engineering major from Purdue or the business major from Arizona State. The party is offering skilled people the freedom to run their race.

No, it is not. Jeb Bush and Condi Rice both repeated a line from Romney’s plan, they want more H-1B immigrants so that the engineering major from Purdue has to compete with a bunch of guys from India who will happily work in the US for peanuts. This is a totally unrealistic and destructive position by the Republicans – also generally shared by Democrats.

–

Anyway Brooks is a clown, has totally lost his foundations and is adrift and directionless, and does not appear to know it, maybe he drinks heavily so as to be careful not to know it, or maybe that comes next.

No, it is not. Jeb Bush and Condi Rice both repeated a line from Romney’s plan, they want more H-1B immigrants so that the engineering major from Purdue has to compete with a bunch of guys from India who will happily work in the US for peanuts. This is a totally unrealistic and destructive position by the Republicans – also generally shared by Democrats

Josh,
You missed your time period. 160 years ago you would have been a Know Nothing complaining about those immigrants taking good American jobs. Strange how the descendents of immigrants, now want to pull up the gang plank after them. One of the reasons to call for immigrants is we don’t have enough of particular skills. We no longer need millions of unskilled laborers, but we do need the skilled.

One of the reasons to call for immigrants is we don’t have enough of particular skills. We no longer need millions of unskilled laborers, but we do need the skilled.
–Mike Giles

Yeah, sure. Now explain why discussions of immigration eventually end up on the topic of farmworkers and America’s supposed need to import millions of ‘em.

As for the “particular skills” argument, I’m amazed by claims that there’s such a dearth of people with technological skills in the latest invented-in-America high-tech yet an abundance of them (with ample experience to boot!) in Third World countries. Explain that, too.

I too had a chance to spend a little time speaking with Brooks this past year. Indeed, he is a very decent fellow. I also watched the PBS broadcast of the convention last night and can tell you that Brooks heard those personal testimonials. After they were given, Judy Woodruff looked and sounded a bit shaken. Brooks and Shields had the same response to them: campaign malpractice. They meant that the Romney campaign should have been made these testimonials part of the campaign before this and seemed mystified that they hadn’t. That was their joint response. Make of that what you will. In that same broadcast, Brooks touched upon the theme in his recent op/ed. So, the column was written before last night.

The most important part that you quote is his emphasis on “governing institutions”. Remember this: Brooks was at one time a Democrat; his wife is a Democrat, and he loves Teddy Roosevelt’s progressivism – but doesn’t seem too keen on all that cowboy, and close to nature stuff TR loved. He is by nature a communitarian who has spent virtually the entirety of his life in urban settings. Look at Brooks’ biography. Read his last book “The Social Animal”; it is a paean to warm, fuzzy, communitarianism. He sees the current call for limited/smaller government as naive and as a threat to his vision of benign governing institutions which ameliorate problems as he defines them. His conservatism is reflected in his sensibilities; less so in his politics.

Yeah but Brooks made his bones and sits in the tenured chair as a conservative alternative to the neo-liberal crypto-socialist left. Bottom line you describe is he’s there under false pretenses.

After they were given, Judy Woodruff looked and sounded a bit shaken. Brooks and Shields had the same response to them: campaign malpractice.

Yes, I saw that too. Judy Woodruff saying, “What, Mitt is a human being? Why didn’t somebody tell me earlier?” Uh-huh. As for Brooks and Shields – did they miss Ryan’s speech the previous day? He explained why it was NOT malpractice – Romney has been playing rope-a-dope, and it’s been working. Malpractice like a fox.

David Brooks grew up in the same East Side neighborhood in Manhattan as David Axlerod, albeit it a decade or so behind him. And it’s not an upper-class area, but middle class, with no guarantee of forward movement in prestige or salary without a lot of work and/or connections.

Axelrod ended up going to Chicago to make his name; Brooks has done it in New York, but when it comes to his title “Conservative Columnist for the New York Times”, the “New York Times” part has become the dog that wags David’s tail. It’s why any column that does have a modicum of bite from the right side of the political aisle will inevitably be followed within the next week by one that seeks to soothe the minds of his bosses and co-workers in saying “Yes, everything you believe about core conservatives is true”.

David saw what the Times did to Bill Kristol when his high-profile conservatism led them not to renew his contract (Ross Douthat is more to the right than Brooks, but as Kristol’s replacement, wisely keeps his head down over on Eighth Avenue). Given the choice between maintaining his status and showing some sort of fidelity to his conservative title, Brooks will mold his opinions properly; being just another conservative columnist at PJ Media, Townhall, some other website or smaller regional or national newspaper would be too awful a fate to contemplate.

Brooks is an often acute observer of the Right, with recurrent blindness only the media centers of the Northeast ritually evince. To him, celebrating success, the virtues of self-reliance, and community spirit is “hyper-individualism!” Yet how do you get strong communities without forward innovating leadership and the skills of wealth-building and self-denial? Instead, because of client-cartelized Democrat politics, we have unsustainable spending, unsustainable debt, and no-way out! Screw Brooks fantasy – TIME FOR THE VIRTUE OF SELF DENIAL.

Capitalism is all about the web of free association – the operative word being “free.”

Brooks vying to be the anthropologist who explains the culture of strange conservative primitives to the evolved readers of the NYT. Like Margaret Mead, he credulously writes falsehoods in his desperation for a story.

The best thing we can do is ignore him, just like we ignore his publisher and the rest of the MSM.

Well, to be honest, I think he has a point. Not every one can be an overachiever, build their own business, become a success story.

It’s not that work itself is the problem, but the initiative and ability. People just can’t do it. And frankly, if everyone even tried, it would be a huge mess, since most businesses fail anyway.

I think many long for the old days, where you could get a blue collar job, work 30-40 years at the same company, then retire. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen anymore. Maybe it was never really sustainable.

But that’s what Democrats are essentially trying to sell (with help of the government, of course), and I think many people find it appealing…and the thing is, if the Democrats can get everyone hooked on the government, either by government jobs or government support, then they will be locked into supporting the Democratic party.

“I think many long for the old days, where you could get a blue collar job, work 30-40 years at the same company, then retire. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen anymore. Maybe it was never really sustainable.”

“It” was very sustainable until the introduction of the Marx meme. Trade Unions existed for centuries before they were “evolved” by the Marx virus. We have begun to return to the “blue collar” way of producing. Au revoir Marx people.

As the resident conservative at the NYT (Brooks) can only go so far in telling the truth. If he went further, he’d risk unemployment (not to mention diminution of status). Consciously and unconsciously, he writes with a gun to his back…

Sounds about right. When I stumble across David Brooks, only one word comes to mind.

Brooks makes it sound like conservatives never give to charities or look out for the poor. Heck, Americans have had a history of helping the less fortunate all the way back to our Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin established the first hospital in what was to become the United States and was probably the major force in creating the Academy and College of Philadelphia, which later merged with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to become the University of Pennsylvania. Americans have always, ALWAYS, answered the call for those in real need and it’s insulting to imply that just because we want government off our backs that we want those less fortunate to simply twist in the wind and die. That is probably the most reprehensible lie that is being uttered by both the left and vermin like Brooks.

All REAL Americans know that it’s their duty to help their neighbors out when they are in need, whether if it’s donating to a food bank, helping flood victims through donations to the Red Cross, or even helping earthquake victims in places like Haiti. Americans have big hearts and even bigger wallets when it really counts, and the Democrats know it. So for them to imply that a demand for smaller government is really a sadistic rallying cry to let all Americans, no matter how desperate, struggle and die, well that is simply mean-spirited, evil, and cruel. THAT is why Obama and his minions will lose in November. They simply don’t understand the American people. And they never will.

“Why is Brooks writing this swill?” because Brooks is the enemy from within, he is not even worthy of the title “RINO”, he is a dyed in the wool leftist and statist who has never, in my opinion, embraced conservatism but poses as a conservative to polish his resume and create commercial demand for himself as a “Republican/conservative” opinion product who can be counted on to be the “conservative” who sees the light of leftist ideaology, he “gets” it as far as the MSM is concerned. Brooks, much like the blithering idiot leftist Matthews seemed infatuated with Obama and complimented Obama’s pants crease and has been outted to have just as big a man crush on the ONE as Matthews. It would be interesting to have Brooks sit down with any journalist and give his position on a host of social issues, across the specturm I’m postive Brooks would score as very left and put the lie to his camoflauge conservatism.

Brooks is a paid monkey. The Times lets him out of his cage a couple of times a week. Her performs. He knows exactly what he can say, what he can’t say. They laugh at his tricks, then give him enough peanuts to keep his slacks adequately creased, then put him back in his cage.

Apparently Brooks wasn’t listening to any of the bootstrap stories he dismisses. These folks all had parents who were the waitress, the “warehouse” guy …

I guess he’s forgotten Marco Rubio’s story already — his mom worked as a and a hotel housekeeper and night shift K-Mart stocker. His father a bartender. Susanna Martinez’s parents took their lower level skills and made something out of them themselves. Rice’s folks (he a pastor, I believe) couldn’t buy her a hamburger but they gave her a vision for what she could be. And the other stories were similar.

None of the story tellers came from wealth and privilege, but they all took advantage of opportunity and worked to make things better. I am sure they all had failrues along the way. All are more successful than my husband or I happen. Should I bear a grudge?

I think Brooks makes his living because he gives someone the Progs can read and then stroke their self righteous feathers. “See? Even a Rethuglian like Brooks sees it our way …”

The road out of serfdom is sometimes messy. But let’s keep the momentum up and let Brooks be a footnote.

Brooks calls himself conservative, but in reality he’s what’s acceptable to Leftys who don’t want to be challenged. He created a niche market for himself.

OTOH, Fox news hires real Leftys who spout their real Lefty BS.

Nope, they are allowed to spout their lefty BS.
How often have you seen a conservative on a Lib network, whose only purpose their seems to be for the Leftoids to shout down, and/or talk over, any point he, or she, is trying to make

I was watching PBS during Paul Ryan’s speech. After the speech the four commentators were at a loss for words. Brooks finally mumbled one sentence, which I could not understand, and Shields had little to say. The two women said nothing. Usually they go after conservatives, but they were basically speechless.

Can I offer a different perspective? There are lots of people who are not rich, who did not go to college, who never had a “career” but a job, who are the bedrock of the conservative movement in the US. In my family we have a couple in which the husband left his factory job and started a bicycle shop that he ran for decades. Never made much money but paid off the house and retired, living on social security. Deep dyed conservatives. Another couple where both work, he in a factory and she as a seamstress, bought a low cost HUD home, and if you measured their status financially would be considered lower middle class. She just ran for Mayor of her small town, and won. Both staunch conservatives. A brother with a GED who retired many years ago as a model maker at a factory. He and his family are staunch conservatives.
In America there are strivers as well as people who find their happiness in family and friends. And when asked to choose between striving and the happiness they have found – without the toys that many of us strive for – they live their lives contentedly surrounded by the people they know and love.
The mistake that Brooks, and so many Liberals, make is to look at the waitress and the warehouse worker and see them as failures. It’s a sneering, condescending attitude that comes from associating with the earnest strivers who equate success with money, status symbols and the “right” attitudes. That’s what’s repellent about Brooks and the danger of the Brooks’ of this world; because they want to force these so-called “failures” to become strivers. And by God, they will create a government program – or several dozen – to do that.

Let’s list some prominent Democrats from the last couple of decades: Carter, Clintons, Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Obama. They are all the most centered striving narcissists imaginable, with little or no regard for anyone else. Let’s list the most prominent Republicans: Ford, Reagan, Dole, Bush, Bush, Cheney, Romney, McCain, Gingrich. Gingrich fits with the Dems and maybe McCain also. The rest are the most modest men, who thought little of the limelight and cared mostly about what they could accomplish. Liberalism is about projecting your vices upon others.

Why is it assumed that a political party, or government, is obliged to “offer” this worker something? Shouldn’t we first inquired into what caused his wages to remain unchanged for a decade?

Brooks (and many others) seem think that taking a job is like stepping onto the bottom step of an escalator: It should automatically carry you higher on the wage scale. And when it fails to do so, then somebody else must re-start the escalator.

Here’s a radical thought: What if the *worker* bears some responsibility for reaching a higher wage level?

I have said in other forums, repeatedly (check my disqus profile) the David Brooks can only be called a “conservative” within the confines of the New York Times. Anywhere else, he would instantly be labeled as a Liberal, or, at best, a Moderate. In no way is this man, or his opinions ‘conservative.’ He’s the epitome of a RINO.

Why are you even paying this man attention…if you ignore him, he becomes irrelevent. Irrelevancy is the worst punish that can be inflicted upon someone as status conscious as Mr. Brooks…and is what Mr. Brooks deserves…he supported Mr. Kerry in 2004 and Mr. Obama in 2008…and will do so again.

Re “we come to the problem of the poor waitress with two kids Brooks refers to. What do the Republicans have to offer her since she’s not about to move to Sunnyvale, California, and rock that start-up?”

The problem is the thought that the waitress with two children is a problem. What problem? Waitress? That’s a problem? – why because it is honest work? 2 kids? Is that a problem or two problems, by the way.

If our culture were more Republican some male would have offered her his hand in marriage. We know what the Democrats are offering – abortion.

The problem is with males. How a hard working waitress with two kids isn’t an attraction eludes me. But then, this is the North East.

“… Brooks is far from the only one with that fog blowing up his occipital lobe.”

Excellent point. And we must be careful on the Right to examine the ways Leftist infection has deformed our own use of language. If these deformations are not fought and countered, then the Leftist narrative lives on, and worse, we become the vectors of that narrative’s continuity. For example, I’ve seen staff writers here at PJM use terms like “pasty white” to mock the predominantly white media when they accuse the Right of RACISM!(tm). Well, it might seem wry and snarky, but I assert that usage of such a revolting anti-white meme only serves to further that meme, not dismantle it. On its face, this particular brand of snark seems like satire, but subconsciously it reinforces the premise which the rotting Left wishes to convey: that there is something inherently or intrinsically wrong with any group predominated by whites. White racism was and is real, as are many other forms form all unmentionable racism by ethnic groups against each other and against whites – but the Left’s construct is a vile conflation and an exercise in rank racism which should not be indulged. This plank of the Left, that whites are inherently evil unless they adopt the platform of the Left is a lethally poisonous trope. Such a rancid premise must be vigorously rejected by the Right. Other readers can fill in all the other ways the Left willfully perverts the meaning of terms (use by Leftist fascists of terms like “liberal” for another example ) to further their dismantling of our civilization in oursuit of Utopia.

…Republicans are heartless strivers ripped from the pages of Ayn Rand.

I realize you are mimicking a leftist attitude to make a point with this phrase, but it comes off as an offhand smear. It was the foes of Rand’s strivers who were heartless as it is the left who are heartless in real life. They take away our rights, our money, or liberty, our life.

Liberals never seem to get it. When circumstances are against you, THAT is when hard work is necessary! Your a immigrant, newly arrived, little money, don’t speak the language? Pretty tough circumstances but there are thousands of success stories that begin exactly that way. In those stories people strove, sweated, endured, and in the end, succeeded.

A Liberal will have you believe that the responsibility of government is to alleviate the necessity to strive and endure. That their Liberal government handouts deplete the national treasury and destroy the mechanisms, via taxes and regulation, that would PROVIDE opportunities seems beyond their understanding.

The ‘bubbas’ that Brooks so despises and looks down upon are generally those who EXPECT to have to work and endure to succeed. Brooks writes for those who still believe that some government agency is required for success. They neve grasp that ‘bubba’ considers the government an intruder on their PERSONAL trek.

Regardless of fault, the sad reality is that there are millions of children in American who are suffering. In one elementary school I visited recently, there were 80 students who were living in cars. In our metro area, hundreds of children go home on weekends to homes without money for food, and Backpack Buddies, a program run here by a collaboration of churches, is often their only chance for food over weekends. And each church has the capacity to help just less than 100 children. It’s not enough. Solid studies by neurologists over years show that the physical damage to developing brains is very difficult to overcome. Our church, along with others, believes it’s important to follow Christ’s teaching of taking care “the least of us.” Being solution-oriented, I ask, “What can we adults do to address these needs?”

One of the consistent characteristics of the left-liberal mindset is the demand for instant remediation of any and all circumstances they deem unsatisfactory. However they write, they appear to “think in exclamation points.” David Brooks, while not a “genetic” liberal, appears to share this trait.

That fellow over there, whose job is to sweep the street? Elevate him to a middle-class income, at once!
And that one in the apartment-building lobby, earning the rent on his basement studio apartment by scrubbing spots off the linoleum? We want him in a four-bedroom colonial, with his name on the deed, pronto!
And that poor woman earning her meager living by waiting tables? Are you aware that she’s paid the minimum wage? Raise that to $25 per hour, immediately!

It simply doesn’t work that way, for reasons both obvious and regrettable:
It takes time and effort to develop skills others find valuable enough to pay middle-class wages for.
Some persons are unwilling to devote the time, or to make the effort.
Some simply don’t care to do so.
And some are already at the limit of their abilities in sweeping streets, scrubbing spots off the floor, or waiting tables.

“Compassion,” one of the Left’s foremost shibboleths, ought to have no place in politics or public policy. “Compassion” is for individuals to feel, toward other individuals whose miseries are in no way their own fault. When politicized, “compassion” changes from a virtue to a terribly destructive vice.

What a government — any government — can do for persons on the lower rungs of the economic ladder is quite limited:
1. It can allow them to keep what they earn.
2. It can stay out of the way of their fledgling enterprises.
3. It can intervene to redress any abuses they might suffer at the hands of predators and fraudsters.

Given those three benefices and time to labor and earn, even persons completely unable to rise above the foot of the ladder of capitalism can accumulate savings, build up their positions, and create a solid foundation for their children’s advancement. State interventions of any other sort create “iron triangles:” alliances of bureaucrats, vendors to government, and dependents of the system, wherein demands for “more” are unceasing, the lion’s share of the swag goes to bureaucrats and their favored contractors, and the “needy” forever increase in number.

Charitable interventions into cases of undeserved human suffering are properly the domain of individuals, and ought never to have been brought into the public sphere. As for cases of deserved human suffering…need I say more?

But these are lessons the Left, and those such as Brooks who seek to retain a place among them as “token conservatives,” are determined not to learn.

I don’t know. Because swill is all he has? Because swill is all he knows? Because swill is his daily diet at the NYT and he thinks he’s too old to do different or better? Or because, as those of us from the mountains know only too well, “Once a bear gets hooked on garbage, there’s no cure.”

Now, he sits on the political panel with Shields, Woodruff, and Ifel looking like a deer in the headlights while making placating clucking noises when he should be defending the co-called conservative side of the argument. David Gergen and David Frum seem to have taken the same tack: What is it about conservative — or once-conservative — journalists called David who appear to have lost their enthusiasm for championing conservatives and conservative causes?

A telling moment at the end of an interview with a Republican politician at the Convention, was when the Republican put his arm around David, who’d remained silent throughout the interview, and said something like “Thanks for your enthusiastic participation, David!” Brooks smiled sheepishly.

I guess it gets lonely being a conservative in the halls of power — and at the New York Times. But it’s sad and off-putting to see a so-called “conservative” pundit carrying water for the other side. Some democracy. Some free press.

That was years ago; in fact so long ago I can’t remember just how long.

Brooks’ punditry has taken a definite move to the left and it’s obvious that he experiences much more discomfort in defending conservative views than he used to. I guess if you want to be invited to parties in NYC — and keep your job at the NYT — you’re best to either hide your conservative views or infrequently voice them.

Q: “What is it about conservative — or once-conservative — journalists called David who appear to have lost their enthusiasm for championing conservatives and conservative causes?”

A: Perhaps they never were as “conservative” to begin with as you had fooled yourself into believeing. Keep in mind who hires these particular specie of “conservatives” … They are all, to a man/woman, Extreme Hard Left execs in the editorial and news offices placing false-flag liberals before the public. This lends these Hard Core Leftists Radicals the veneer of “fairness”, and then permits these Hard Left Traitors define anyone to the right of such mealy-mouthed “conservatives” as David Gergen(lol) as “extreme right wing”…

Steady there, Brooks does write well but that doesn’t mean he sees or understands anything — anything at all — about policy or a zillion things. Equally likely he’s just another pompous media twit who neither likes nor mingles with the wretched hoi polloi.

Some complex inner game built around job security is possible, but why not keep it simple? His myopia (being polite) is entirely consistent with his own rather modest upbringing across from all the rich kids on the other side of the park. He finally got his, and that’s that. Pull up the drawbridge!

As for now, he’s just another boring old talking head with a muddy mind who’s contributed little in decades. Forget him.

Regarding high conservative giving, and low liberal charitable giving, you point out that the difference “equals out some when you exempt religious charities, but only some.”

But why does it matter that a considerable portion of giving goes to religious charities? Religious charities serve the common good (i.e., not some private religious good) but do so on the basis of their faith principles. Here’s a tiny example of serving the common good: my small northern church sent volunteer work teams to LA and MS over the course of many months and repaired, I think, close to 50 homes–all funded out of our church budget. Bigger examples of serving the common good include all the faith-based international relief and development organizations. They serve regardless of the religion of the people in need–and they always have! Bottom line, the very notion that the dollar given to a faith-based charity should be discounted because it somehow represents self interest rather than public service is based on a very inaccurate understanding of how the faith sector actually works.

But, even in those cases where a faith charity serves co-religionists, what would be the grounds for discounting that help? Does the charitable dollar that pays the bills for the unemployed co-religionist not count as an act of public service? Does the charitable dollar spent to support the elderly co-religionist in a safe home represent narrow self-interest? Is it only a public good if the person helped is not of your faith?

I agree, Just Wondering. I was merely giving the other side the benefit of the doubt for argument’s sake. (Though we certainly know from the Holy Land case there are certain instances when religious charitable giving can be nefarious – as when it goes to Hamas.)

Well-said, JustWondering. Discounting “religious” giving is just one more instance of Leftard bias towards the Church which, as you’ve pointed out, more often than not is offering help to people in need outside the Church. One definition of the Christian Church is that it’s the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members ~ C.S. Lewis.

Definitely, it counts for something, but if the money I give to my Church goes first to upkeep of the church, the ministers salaries, and its other programs which benefit ME directly, because I like going to the church and being part of its many programs and benefits, that is quite different than my giving money to World Vision to feed the starving in Africa. To be fair, the non-religious often give money to museums, and other non-profit organizations which they are part of, but not usually in the intimate way in which our churches are extensions of our own homes. But what the hell, all are tax-deductible…at the moment.

“1 don’t see what the party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose wages have stagnated for a decade.”

Really? Really? ! Does Brooks believe an econonmy that is more free market and less socialist won’t produce a wealthier, growing and more dynamic econonmy than it socialist counterpart. He should hit on a few waitresses in Texas then Greece then North Korea and then get back to us. You have to be very educated to be as dumb as David Brooks.

Romney does display great charity and community spirit in his private life. Where Brooks loses touch as a conservative is in thinking that government is the right vehicle for expressing this charity and community spirit. Kindly ideas, in the hands of government, become means for constituency-tending, bases for regulation, and ultimately, sinecures for professional advocates, who are always discouraged because the taxpayer still has so much of his own money left.

Exactly right, and well stated. As far as I’ve been able to tell, “compassionate conservatism” is just code for progressivist statism with conservative “values”. No thanks. Ultimately, it just undermines every other form of (voluntary) community that makes up a part of Brooks’ beloved “Burkean webs”. Brooks would do well to consider the thoughts of fellow Times “conservative” columnist Ross Douthat, both in his Jan 28, 2012 op-ed “Government and its Rivals”, and especially his tremendous review of Robert Nisbet published a couple days later in First Principles.

SIMON: Like Brooks, you and your colleagues (among the best and the brightest), will not “go too far,” lest you lose your employment and your “social status.” Never have so many powerful voices gone silent; never have so many abandoned our Constitution and failed to challenge the candidacy
of an ineligible, illegal and destructive President. You remain silent and risk a second illegal term and the irreparable harm that will result. It is almost impossible to imagine that so many clear-eyed, informed, otherwise principled people, would succumb to such a spineless need to protect their positions rather than face the issue and describe the Elephant In The Room. Apparently your readers are in silent concert with you; but for this reader your sad failure to deal with the eligibility issue renders anything else you, and your silent colleagues, write, valueless.

DWIGHT: In good faith, please help me understand your thinking. To keep things simple, let me list some altertive reasons for your position. (If I omit the right one, just correct me.) Then, if you’re agreeable, we can do some talking.

If you’d rather not, that’s fine, too.

Starting Points:

1. You think Obama’s a “natural born citizen” and is eligible for the office.

2. You don’t think it matters whether Obama is or is not a “natural born citizen.”

3. You think Obama’s long form birth certicate is genuine.

4. You don’t think it matters whether the certificate is genuine.

4. You don’t think it matters whether Obama releases or doesn’t release his college applications and college transcripts.

5. You think people who involve themselves in any or all of these issues are lunatic fringe crackpots.

It should be obvious that giving people an opportunity to make a living is compassionate…and besides, people should be compassionate in their every day lives,they should not expect some government program to do it for them.

Read Paul krugman’s column today and the comments. Paul Ryan is a liar , following the father of the lie Mitt Romney. They shame faith believers for being liars in the eyes of faith believers . Then in the comments hints of faith believers being delusional. This is the natural road of secularism bringing us China as the role model for the future world where an atheist elite rule who are not liars because no one gets close enough to them to see their flaws and this makes great Super power Empire very successful as we have seen in the past .
Only the three Abraham faiths united can save the west from being swallowed up by the coming Atheist east.
What will be the standard to bring about this: “You must be perfect as the heavenly father is perfect.”
Stop judging others. This is want stands in the way of repentance for sinners and how the elite control the masses through the shame of sin and our fallen human nature